(Daily Mail) – Talk to Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa and you’ll notice a common trait: They both have female voices. While this can help make robotic assistants more relatable and natural to converse with, it has assigned a gender to a technology that’s otherwise genderless. Now, researchers are hoping to offer a new alternative by launching what they’re calling the world’s first ‘genderless voice.’ The voice, called ‘Q’, was created by researchers from Copenhagen Pride,
equality campaign organization EqualAI and Virtue, a creative agency under Vice, to be gender neutral. To do this, they recorded voices from participants who identify as non-binary, or neither exclusively female nor male. Researchers then tested the voice on 4,600 people across Europe. Testers were asked to grade the voice between one and five, with one meaning a male voice and five a female one. The voice was then modulated and tested again until it was widely perceived as gender neutral, the developers said. READ MORE
